


Family Matters

by iamfitzwilliamdarcy



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Gen, referenced miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-12-03 04:58:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11525037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamfitzwilliamdarcy/pseuds/iamfitzwilliamdarcy
Summary: Gen has two brothers and a father, and sometimes they act like it (spoiler for Thick as Thieves in the third part)





	Family Matters

**Author's Note:**

> written half on my phone and not proofread; flinging here into the void lol enjoy

It did not do to have favorites in families, but among the Minister of War’s sons, the consensus was (secretly) they were all most fond of Eugenides. Temenus knew Eugnides favored Stenides; it was hard not to favor Sten, and the two were alike in being different. Temenus himself enjoyed a closer relationship with their father, even if it was just by virtue of working for him.

The problem with loving someone like Eugenides, though, was that he was constantly in trouble. From the time they were children, and Gen even now was barely older than a child, he was antagonizing their aunts and cousins, his sisters, his brothers, even their mother, and most of all their father.

Temenus was not often in the right place at the right time when it came to his younger brother. He heard of fights only after they had happened, he rounded corners just in time to see Eugenides leap from a balcony. So it was only by chance, and the orders of general far higher up than Temenus himself, that he was at the Attolian border when the Magus of Sounis and the Thief of Eddis crossed through.

He was with the horses at the time, chatting with the groom on duty, when the camp started stirring. A guard, passing by, looking for the captain, called to him, “Temenus, it’s Eugenides!”

Temenus blinked. “He’s here?” he called to the guard, but the guard, one of his cousins, was already out of earshot.

He turned to the groom, who shrugged, and then followed to the guard to his captain. He quickly had to reroute to follow his captain to the commotion.

And it was, indeed, Eugenides. Temenus had only a moment to glimpse him, leaning against a scrawny little boy, looking slightly less for wear, before the captain ordered him to bring them horses.

Temenus did as he was told, but only has just started towards the groom again when the captain stopped him. He never took his eyes of Gen and his companions, but he didn’t speak loud enough for them to hear when he said, “lieutenant. Get your own horse as well and take some men with you. They’ll need an escort back to the Queen. I’ll take care of the Attolians." 

Temenus didn’t thank him, just nodded and moved about his business. He made sure to grab one cousin he knew quarreled with Eugenides out of fondness and not malice and a few other, more distant soldiers.

He returned quickly with the horses, brushed and saddled thanks to the groom’s proactive thinking. They got the boy settled in a saddle but when their cousin went to haul Gen up, he nearly collapsed and the other boy started shouting.

Temenus, distracted from his own horse, handed his reins off and came over. "What’s wrong?” He asked just as Aulus ordered a young soldier to get a blanket.  
“Look yourself,” Aulus said to Temenus. “He’s not doing well.”  
Temenus took a closer look at his brother’s face, pale and tight with pain, and nodded sharply. “I’ll take him. We’ll move quickly.”

Temenus mounted his horse and the young soldier returned with the blanket. Aulus was gentle wrapping Gen up in it and then lifting him up to Temenus’s waiting arms. Temenus settled Gen in front of him, keeping a steady hand on the reins and his arms steady around his brother. They were off before either of them spoke.

“Why are you here?” Gen asked. It was the first sign he had acknowledged his brother at all. “You’re not supposed to be.”

“What have you gotten yourself into this time?” Temenus said back.

“Go away,” Gen said, but it was mumbled, almost slurred, and he was asleep (or unconscious, temenus wasn’t sure) just a moment later.

He dismounted when they arrived and helped Gen down with him, but chaos was was quick in coming wherever Eugenides was involved. The court chartered, delighted in its gossip, the queen looked to him, and he could only shrug. He could not hear her and did not know what he could say anyway. He looked for the Minister of War, who would want to know, but found him in the crowd before he sent a soldier off to fetch him.

It was much later, after the chaos had been dead for hours, that Temenus sought his father out and found him in the library attached to Gen’s room.

“You know,” he said, not looking at the Minister directly. “If you keep stepping in to change my orders, there will be talk that you favor me.”

He chanced a glance at the Minister, who only raised his eyebrows placidly. They both knew the only one who has ever accused him of playing was Temenus himself, in a grief-stricken, rage-induced shouting match shortly after his mother had died. It had been Temenus’ sole outburst. He took after his father like that.

Temenus shook his head, smiling a little. “You knew then?”

“I had an idea,” the Minister said. It was his turn to not look at Temenus. He studied the door behind which his youngest child lay. “That he might come home that way.”

Temenus didn’t finish aloud the Minister’s thought. An exceedingly taciturn, practical man, it would have been embarrassing for them all to say the Minister had wanted Eugenides to return to a friendly face, to someone who would take care of him and bring him home.

Any eddisian would have done it. But only Temenus was a soldier who loves Gen as the Minister did.

“Lucky that,” he said aloud instead, and the Minister nodded.  
*********

There were things that Stenides knew, by word of mouth, that happened at the castle. For example, he knew when the Thief of Eddis had been captured in Attolia. He heard, still anxiously, of the Thief’s return and that his hand had not made the trip.

He never, though, learned of any news from his father. So when the letter came from the Minister of War that said only “Come quickly” Stenides went.

He came to the palace, frenzied with hushed conversations and war plans and mourning and anger. His cousin Crodes, grabbed him as he made his way to the library. He was on duty, apparently, as Queen’s messenger but stopped upon seeing Stenides.

“Have they warned you?” he asked, face soft with concern.

“I know what he’s lost,” Stenides said carefully. “And only that my father said to come.”

Crodes shook his head. “He’s up there with him now. The Queen just left. You’ll see.”

The Minister of War was pacing in the library, and Stenides braced himself. That his stoic father expressed any agitation, even in movement, was not a good sign. Stenides cleared his throat to announce himself, and his father looked up, entirely composed, and nodded in greeting.

“What’s wrong?” Stenides asked. It came out closer to a demand than he intended.

His father was still for a long moment. Then he said, words picked carefully, “It’s more than moping. He lays in his bed all day or he sits and stares out of his window. He doesn’t talk, he doesn’t smile. Sometimes I fear he might fling himself off a ledge”

“He lost his hand,” Stenides reminded him, as if any of them could forget. He was a little startled at how open his father was being. “He lost his lifestyle. Isn’t he allowed to mourn that?”

His father pressed his lips into a thin line, and Stenides shook his head. “I don’t know what I can do for him,” he warned his father.

His father nodded. He knew. “Just see him.”

So Stenides did.

Eugenides lay in bed, his back to the door. “Did you hear any of that?” Stenides asked lightly, teasing, because if he knew his brother, he knew he was an eavesdropper.

Eugenides didn’t say anything. Stenides sighed and plopped himself down on the bed. He nudged Eugenides to move, and he complied all too easily until Stenides was comfortable laying next to him.

After a long moment, Eugenides spoke. “Is the Minister of War,” he said, voice far more bitter than an acidly wicked Stenides would have preferred, “aware that a man with one hand would be as useless at watch making as he is at soldiering or thieving?”

“I think,” Stenides started. He rested a hand on Eugenides’ back; Gen flinched, but he didn’t push or pull away, so Stendines continued, pointed. “I think that Father is far more concerned with your current well-being than he is with your skill-set.”

“Former skill-set,” Eugenides corrected. Gen let out a long sigh and rolled over at last. He shifted so he was pressed up against Stenides side, and Stenides shifted so his arm was around his little brother.

They lay in silence for a long while, and Stenides took the time to study his brother. He had shifted slowly, and he wasn’t complaining at all. His breath wasn’t labored, but it wasn’t easy either, and his brow stayed pinched, even with his eyes shut. Stenides rubbed his thumb across the crease, willing Gen to relax a little.

“Are you in much pain?” he whispered.

“I don’t want lethium,” Gen said back; his voice was hoarse instead of snappy. “And I don’t want Galen.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

Gen didn’t answer for a long time. His face was too pale, his hair, cut choppily, too short, and he was too quiet. There was reason for the Minister’s call.

Finally, Gen just nodded.

“I am sorry,” Stenides said. “For what they did to you.”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

It was like Gen was little again, snuggled up next Stenides, his only confidant apart from Helen, whispering secrets of whose earrings he had stolen, who he had fought that day (who had broken his ribs that once), where Grandfather had taken him. Those last ones were always hushed, furtive, because Grandfather had told Eugenides to tell no one. Stenides would have except that he was sure his mother already knew.

“What is it?” he asked.

Gen was quiet again and then he said, softly, “I don’t hate her. I think…I think I might love her.”

Stenides, thrown, slid a glance down at him. Gen smiled back, but it was bitter, self-depreciating. It wasn’t a smile of Gen’s he had ever seen and wasn’t one he was particularly fond of.

“See?” Gen said. “I can no longer be of any service to anyone, not even in matchmaking.”

They fell quiet again. Stenides rubbed his hand up and down Gen’s arm. He felt warm through his shirt sleeve, even though they had told Stenides his fever had broken weeks ago.

“Do you think,” Stenides ventured gently, “that we will not love you if you are not useful?”

Gen closed his eyes, and it was all the answer Stenides needed. He rolled onto his side, and tapped Gen’s chin.

“Look at me,” he said, and waited for Gen to open his eyes, to turn his face towards him. “There is nothing you could do—or not do—that would make us, any of us, love you any less. When you ripped up your enlistment papers, did Father suddenly stop caring for you? And even now our cousins walk this castle, angry on your behalf, concerned for your well-being. We do not love you because you are the Thief of Eddis and because you can steal anything. We love you because you’re you, Gen. And if you never leave this bed again, we would love you still, even—” he reached out and tapped Gen’s nose, the way he used to when they were little—“if it would grieve me to see you so unhappy the rest of your life.”

Gen almost sounded like his old self when he said, “You should have been a poet, not a watchmaker.”

Stenides laughed. “Insolent, incorrigible little whelp,” he said, swatting, softly, at his brother’s shoulder. He shook his head and added, “Speaking of.”

He dug into his pocket and tossed the watch onto the covers. “Newest one,” he said. “Just for you.”

Gen reached out and clasped the watch into his left hand. He smiled, and it was real and almost full, and that was a start.

*********

The Attolian court was abuzz with news—the theft of high Mede slave, the queen’s nearly renewed health, the rumor that the King had once bit the cook—but this was not what concerned Eddis’ Minister of War. He made his way to the King’s chambers where he found, as he always did, to his chagrin, he had to get through the King’s personal guards and attendants.

Once admitted, only with the King’s direct permission, he sat passively on the chair indicated and waited until the King said, “Oh, all right,” and shooed his remaining attendants and guards away. 

“I wanted to be alone anyway,” Eugenides said. He stressed the word alone.

The Minister of War just looked at him. He was taller, as he grew with each visit, broader, but he looked ragged underneath his pretenses, eyes strained, mouth pinched.

Without preamble, the Minister said, “Your Uncle who was Eddis lost both his sons in a week.”

“Stop,” Gen said. He had lifted his hand like he might cover his ears to keep from hearing.

“He grieved them every day until his dying breath, which, as you recall, was not long after. He was never the same.”

“Stop,” Gen insisted. His voice was black, hollow. Angry. “I will have you thrown out. Stop.”

“He did not grieve for his heir or his country,” The Minister of War leaned forward a little. “He had an heir still remaining to him. He grieved his children, whom he loved.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Gen’s face was stony, a passable imitation of his father.

The Minister sat back. “I have heard your news.”

“And you are here to what? Torment me?”

Abruptly, the Minister said, “We lost a child. Your mother and I.”

Gen picked a book and flung it. It whizzed by the Minister’s head and hit the wall behind him.

He continued, “A baby girl. Stenides was barely over a year, Penelope not yet born. We’d had names picked out, and we gave her hers and buried her in the same day. I thought your mother would never recover the loss. I… found myself struggling at times as well.”

“I don’t want to hear!” Gen said, voice a hoarse shout. “Shut up. Please.”

“I still catch myself thinking about her sometimes.” He raised his eyes to where Gen was standing in the room, chest heaving, his one hand clenched into a fist, the hook hanging by his side like it wanted to be clenched too.

“I thought,” Gen said, after a long moment to gather his composure, “that I had lived through all the worst parts of life already. And I am wrong.” His voice broke. “Why is it me they let live?” he asked desperately. “Why won’t he let me fall?”

“I don’t pretend to know the ways of the gods,” the Minister said. He stood and moved towards the King. The King, who was his youngest child, and young still, even though regency, marriage, (snatched fatherhood) had aged him.

The King didn’t look back at him. Only Gen.

“It hurts,” Gen said.

The Minister nodded.

Gen cried. He fell into his father’s arms and sobbed, heaving, gasping sobs. It was, the Minister suspected, the first time he’d let himself. The Minister held him, as he’d once held his own wife many years ago.

Better days would come soon.


End file.
